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Protesters plan to pack the Statehouse today to urge Gov. John Kasich to veto abortion
restrictions slipped into the two-year state budget at the last minute.

They’re hoping to follow the success of hundreds of Texas women who swarmed the legislature
there to derail an anti-abortion bill.

However, the odds of it happening in Ohio are slim.

Kasich is a Republican governor who likely has signed more anti-abortion legislation than any
Ohio governor. The protesters’ best reason for hope right now might be that Kasich would not rule
out a line-item veto yesterday.

“Let me make it clear, I will examine the language keeping in mind the fact that I am pro-life,
period,” Kasich said, after he was asked by reporters for the fifth time.

The measures Republicans added to the budget on Tuesday night included requiring doctors to
search for a heartbeat and telling the woman the statistical probability of carrying the fetus to
full term before performing an abortion. Also in the budget are provisions to cut off Planned
Parenthood clinics from federal family-planning dollars and ban abortion providers from
transferring patients to public hospitals.

Without a veto, opponents will try to put Kasich in the “war on women” category that swallowed
Republicans in 2012. U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri lost his race after talking about “
legitimate rape,” and women picked President Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 11 percentage
points. But it’s also far from clear that labeling Kasich would knock him from office next
year.

In Quinnipiac University Polling Institute’s latest survey, released on Tuesday, Kasich enjoyed
a record (for him) 54 percent approval rating, which included a 47 percent approval from women. He
trailed Democratic candidate Ed FitzGerald by just 2 points with women and led by 14 percentage
points overall.

“The most important issue is the economy. It’s recovering, and that’s going to help Kasich,”
said Larry J. Sabato, a national political scientist with the University of Virginia’s Center for
Politics. “I think he will win re-election. But do these provisions hand an issue to the eventual
Democratic nominee? Absolutely, yes.”

Democrats already have begun to hit Kasich.

“Apparently the lesson John Kasich and his Republican allies took from the 2012 election was
they weren’t extreme enough on issues of women’s health care,” said Matt McGrath, an Ohio
Democratic spokesman focused on the 2014 gubernatorial election. McGrath said it “isn’t a matter of
politics: It’s a matter of standing up for Ohio women.”

The idea behind today’s planned protest — organized by NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio — is to re-create
the scene from the Texas legislature from Tuesday night. Hundreds of women stormed the Texas Senate
floor and helped Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis protest a vote on a bill that would’ve banned
abortions past 20 weeks, among other things.

“People are pretty jazzed after what happened in Texas yesterday, so I’m hoping that that leads
into momentum,” said Jaime Miracle, policy director for NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio.

There’s no chance for a filibuster here, so urging Kasich to veto the provision is the
protesters’ only hope. Protest organizers asked people to flood Kasich’s office with phone calls
yesterday. Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols reported an “uptick” in call volume but not “a carpet
bombing.”

Michael Gonidakis, executive director of Ohio Right to Life, says preserving the measures in the
budget would be the right thing for Kasich to do politically, given his history of signing pro-life
measures and his current polling numbers. Meanwhile, Miracle said women would punish him for waging
a “war on women.”

“They can have their position,” Kasich said. “I have been pro-life my whole career, that’s just
the way it is.”